Stem Cells - The Hope and the Hype

zer0skill writes to mention a CNN summary of a Time cover story. The Truth about Stem Cells deals with an increasingly politicized area of scientific inquiry, and likens the fight to those over global warming and evolution. From the article: "Five years after Bush announced that federal money could go to researchers only working on embryonic stem cell lines that scientists had already developed, Democrats hope to leverage the issue as evidence that they represent the reality-based community, running against the theocrats. States from Connecticut to California have tried to step in with enough funding to keep the labs going and slow the exodus of U.S. talent to countries like Singapore, Britain and Taiwan."

Comments

Re:Let me kick this off

[Otter]

By that logic, we should also ban Harvard Medical School from researching with cadavers...

Cadaver use, and anything else related to human or other mammalian research *is* tightly regulated. And yet nobody thinks IRB's are part of The War On Science (TM). I don't agree with the federal funding ban, but a bioethics debate and a factual issue like evolution versus creationism are completely different things and the fact that people treat them interchangeably makes it clear how little they're motivated by science.